Though there were no visible socialist institutions to which you could attach yourself, CND provided a vast umbrella – a social movement which was both political and cultural. It assumed an urgent relevance in October 1962, when President Kennedy ordered a blockade of Cuba until the Soviet Union withdrew its nuclear missiles. Tension had been building up since Khrushchev’s declaration of Soviet support for national liberation struggles in 1961, when Kennedy had supported the disastrous Bay of Pigs attempt to invade Cuba. Filled with doom and trepidation, I went to Blackwell’s and bought a book by the medieval historian Maurice Keen on the legend of Robin Hood, thinking, ‘This could be the last book I ever read.’ It seemed a rather incongruous way to go. Hazy images of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii, which I’d read at school, floated about in my head as I went to a call box and rang my mother. I had to warn her we were in imminent danger. My eve-of-destruction mood brought reassurances not to worry. My mother’s view on politics was ignore it and it won’t happen; in the event she was right. At the last moment Kennedy drew back from military intervention. We survived. However, with hindsight knowledge of the internal discussions of the American politicians makes it clear that the danger of nuclear war was very real in 1962.
The Cuba crisis had revealed just how powerless we were. It confirmed Bob’s exasperation with the moral-witnessing strand in CND. With his customary energetic rigour, he applied himself to studying the history of the Cold War and learning about military strategy with his friend Douglas Gill, who shared a house at 123 Kingston Road. Like Bob, Douglas was tall, but blond with a large, stubborn face that reminded me of a giant in his castle. Believing the left had to beard the enemy in its den, the two well-read young men would take themselves off in their jeans to argue against nuclear weapons with officers from the military who came to speak at Oxford. For Douglas, military history was to become a lifelong interest, though he approached it with a radical eye and was later to write a history of mutinies with Gloden Dallas. As they would practise their arguments in the Kingston Road kitchen in very loud, confident voices, even I was soon able to hold forth on the inadequacies of the ‘domino theory’, which regarded Communism as a contagious disease spread through geographical proximity.
Bob and Douglas had helped the impressive CND organizer Peggy Duff to produce a duplicated news sheet called Focus at the Labour Party conference. However, as 1962 drew to a close, serious rifts had appeared within CND over whether it was worthwhile continuing to pressurize for unilateral disarmament within the Labour Party. The Committee of 100, backed by Bertrand Russell, believed in non-violent direct action and from 1961 had initiated ‘sit-downs’. They were prepared to be carried off, arrested and imprisoned for their beliefs.
Sitting down was more alluring than sitting around passing resolutions to me and to many of my friends – including Bar, who had already been dragged off by the police in Trafalgar Square. Direct action also appealed to the wider mood of contempt for the Conservative government and the sense of urgency which came from the Cuba crisis. In the autumn of 1962 Oxford households received absurd instructions from Civil Defence about putting out sandbags. Meanwhile, we had discovered that Regional Seats of Government had been created to preserve an élite of dons.
After holding out on CND for so long because of my outsider scruples, I threw myself into preparations for the 1963 Aldermaston march with excited conviction. This was an Aldermaston with a difference. Just before Easter a small group had secretly produced the ‘Spies for Peace’ document, which revealed there was a Regional Seat of Government outside Reading, conveniently near our route. All over the country people in Committee of 100 groups began spontaneously Roneoing copies of ‘Spies for Peace’ and distributing them to CND members.
I was alone one night in Bob and Douglas’ house when there was a knock on the door. A man with short back and sides, wearing a grey suit, stood on the threshold. On guard and convinced this was a plain-clothes policeman, I was noncommittal when he asked for copies of ‘Spies for Peace’. To my great chagrin, he turned out to be a left-wing trade unionist who wanted to give them out at the Cowley car plant, where he worked.
The 1963 Aldermaston march was a massive 70,000 strong. But the leaders of CND and Committee of 100 were locked in conflict over tactics and strategy. Peggy Duff stood with a loudspeaker as we approached some woods near Reading. ‘Straight on for lunch,’ bellowed the portly, grey-haired toughie, who was such an efficient organizer. This time, however, about 1,000 marchers weren’t listening. Defiantly, we turned off to the left, down a path which led into the woods. Fancy her thinking we could be dissuaded by our stomachs! ‘If music be the food of love play on,’ sang a bearded anarchist from University College, London, strumming his guitar, as we headed down a path through the trees. It led us to a square brick building with a flat roof surrounded by barbed wire, whereupon everyone started arguing. A hardened Glaswegian contingent wanted to break down the doors and cursed the lily-livered middle class; one man threw a desultory stone down the wooded slope. Anarchists and pacifists sat themselves down outside the door. This symbolic moral protest infuriated Bob, who insisted that as we had found the Regional Seat of Government we should investigate it properly. A picture of him later appeared on the back of Anarchy magazine, standing with his hand on his duffel bag surrounded by seated demonstrators in the middle of the woods. Years later I heard that the organizers knew there were guards in the Regional Seat of Government who had been ordered to shoot if we went inside. It was just as well this was one logical argument Bob didn’t win!
As we all trooped back to the road, flushed with excitement and still disagreeing about what we should have done, a car came speeding towards us down the track. Always nosy, I stared curiously at the driver, a man in plain clothes wearing a trilby hat and a mac. Gripping the wheel, he returned my gaze with a look of apoplectic fury. Then he wrenched the wheel and drove the car directly at me. I froze in shock and the car missed me only because a quick-thinking Bob dragged me to the side of the path, kicking the car in anger. Briefly we had placed ourselves outside the customary relation of the middle classes to the law. Rejoining the march, our contingent busied itself by plastering the secret telephone number of the Regional Seat of Government in pub lavatories for the information of London citizens.
Back in Leeds, I wore my CND badge, which was briefly to be a declaration of wild extremity, with pride. I had turned into a kind of collective outsider now; people fell away from me in W. H. Smith. We had touched a twitchy nerve of state security and were denounced as hoodlums in the newspapers. To my disgust, even the left Labour paper Tribune joined the disapproving chorus. My Tory father, on the other hand, responded with unexpected pride. He had heard that the military police had been called to disperse us and he hated them. He had no time for ban-the-bombers or pacifists, but he thought the invasion showed grit and moral courage. As he went around selling his pit motors, he boasted to colliery managers about his daughter marching to a Regional Seat of Government.
The appeal of adventure in the woods provided an attractive alternative to political meetings. Before long local CND groups were excitedly clambering through the countryside, scouting around for their local Regional Seats of Government. Signs were erected announcing their whereabouts and they had become a joke. As for me, this début in political activism was to ruin me for committee meetings and points of order for ever more. It was to be networks and movements which drew me rather than ‘proper’ politics.
Direct action was, however, having a fissiparous impact in 1963 upon the broad church of CND, which could survive only through a will for tolerance. I had become involved just as the broad ‘Ban the Bomb’ movement began to crack under pressure. Nonetheless, as with all significant social movements, the dissolution of CND was to leave shoots in many unexpected places, from which came all kinds of ideas about alternatives, political and cultural. The repercussions of these were to travel through the sixties and beyond. Like the New Left, CND
and its ramifications were to shift the parameters of ‘politics’ and lay the basis for a radicalism outside the orbit of both parties and trade unions. One example was the Campaign Caravans, started by a Committee of 100 member, George Clark, which were to contribute to the community struggles around housing of the mid-sixties. They brought the ideas of similar anti-poverty projects in the United States into the British left. Colin Ward’s magazine Anarchy was also influential, pioneering direct action against poor-law conditions in homeless hostels, advocating squatting and anti-authoritarian free schools and exposing conditions in prison. The combination of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the opposition to nuclear weapons in Britain meant that direct action was no longer confined to the tiny anarchist groups.
Committee of 100 and CND were also to have significant consequences for civil liberties. In July 1963 Bob wrote from Newport, saying he was going to demonstrate against the Queen of Greece, who was visiting Britain. The Greek royal family’s association with the vicious right wing in their homelands had made them extremely unpopular. After this demonstration, George Clark was charged with incitement (for unlawfully obstructing the highway) and conspiracy. Historically the use of the notoriously vague offence of conspiring’ has always been a sure sign that the British state was in one of its spasms of insecure authoritarianism.
Indeed, the Tory government that summer was in the throes of the sex and security scandal involving the Minister of Defence, John Profumo, and Christine Keeler. Her involvement with a Soviet diplomat and the osteopath Stephen Ward, who had links to MI53, made the revelations not only morally embarrassing but politically damaging. Harold Wilson pressed home the point. Macmillan’s government was being assailed in the press as effete and ineffective and the forces of law and order were decidedly twitchy.
Though George Clark was to be released on appeal, other demonstrators were treated severely and it was to be the tenacious, dissenting spirit of CND which came to their support. It transpired that Detective Sergeant Challoner and other police officers had planted bricks on the demonstrators, whom they had also assaulted. CND bred a scepticism about the law among sections of the radical middle class which was to feed into the growing disenchantment with the police among the young during the sixties. A generation learned from experience that the law could be unjust.
A minor civil liberties battle flared up in Oxford, when Richard Wallis, an Anarchist who lived with Bob and Douglas, was stopped by the Oxford police from selling his copies of Peace News on the High Street. CND started a broad campaign for the freedom to sell on the street, so broad indeed that the budding Tory politician Jonathan Aitken was recruited to defend Richard.
Richard, a cheerful enthusiast with a brown beard, introduced me to the writings of Kropotkin and to health food. This consisted of lots of wholemeal flour and dark-brown sugar, bought in sacks for reasons of economy, though Bob queried sugar’s classification as healthy. Richard, a carpenter, was also a staunch believer in the merits of wood: pottery, being vaguely associated with civilization, was tainted with modernity and therefore suspect. Accordingly, I would sit like one of the three bears, eating porridge from a wooden bowl and breaking up hard lumps of dark-brown sugar which had coagulated in the sack. Richard later went to live in a strange household in the Cotswolds belonging to a woman who received and typed spirit messages from Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who, she maintained, were still trying to write in the afterlife. I sympathized with their frustration, but when I perused the typed volumes felt puzzled – something disastrous had occurred to their writing styles.
After CND dwindled, people like Richard who belonged to the movement’s back-to-nature wing continued its unconventional lifestyle traditions, constituting a ‘missing link’ between the beats and the hippies of the late sixties. This anarchical strand in English radical culture was to prove extremely resilient, interacting with peace and green politics in the eighties and the direct action of the nineties.
Other offshoots from ‘bomb culture’ spread into folk clubs, which stimulated the folk and blues revival. They unfurled in jazz and poetry readings which aimed to make poetry more accessible and relevant, and were to become early gathering points for the hippie underground. Sometimes the margins affected the mainstream. Some blues and rock musicians had close links with CND and the success of the Beatles meant blues became big-time. A friend from St Hilda’s took me round to 4A St Clement’s, a CND house in Oxford where avant-garde art, poetry and music brewed amidst the banners. The singer, Paul Pond (later Paul Jones), was still living there with his partner, the writer Sheila MacLeod, but was soon to join Manfred Mann. By 1964 we were humming their hits ‘5–4–3–2–1’ and ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’.
CND enlarged the space to be weird. As the Aldermaston march approached London in 1964, I saw a peculiar figure standing by the side of the road holding a placard on which there was simply a question mark. He had a completely green face and strange insect-like antennae. ‘That’s Hoppy,’ said someone, as if this was explanation enough. It was indeed John Hopkins, who later started the underground paper IT. He had just taken LSD.
A minority on the Aldermaston marches always tried to keep up standards: the sombre, older men in long grey macs, for instance, or Ken Smith’s friend from Hull docks, Dave Godman, in his carefully polished winkle-picker shoes. ‘You’ll get blisters, Dave,’ I warned. He was staggering in pain by the last day, but still insisting he wasn’t having any of the middle-class crap. They could keep their boots and their carrot sandwiches. He was going to look normal.
Only a Tibetan inner eye could have seen that the scruffy horde chanting ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough decide now’ were the advance guard of a future boom in British fashion. But the CND marches inadvertently provided a mass display of what had formerly been art-school styles. Copying Bardot, by 1963 we were not only cutting the inner seams out of our jeans and sewing them tighter but sitting in the bath to make them shrink. Bob Scheer, the left-wing American journalist who had helped radicalize Bob in Berkeley, was to be bowled over by this custom, which he insisted was peculiar to Britain, when he went to Aldermaston during a visit that year.
Bob Scheer sat on the sofa in Kingston Road that Easter, telling tales of corruption and dirty tricks about John F. Kennedy which profoundly shocked our English ears. When Kennedy was assassinated in November, he was to be instantly sanctified by the media. Because of Bob Scheer, Bob, Douglas and I refused to mourn. On reflection Bob Scheer was right about Kennedy’s ruthless managing of the political machine; on the other hand, though lukewarm on Civil Rights when he took office, his support for desegregation in 1963 was to be crucial in America’s internal politics of race. That November any criticism was profoundly heretical; we found ourselves in uncomfortable isolation and I was forced to modify my opinion of the handful of Trotskyists who then belonged to the International Socialist Group in Oxford. We gathered in the bedroom where they held their meetings, defiant, extreme and convinced that the rest of the world had wool over its eyes.
Belonging to anything remained a real dilemma for me. Rejecting the Labour Club, which I considered to be full of career politicians, I decided to branch out on my own. The dockers’ leader Jack Dash, who was a Communist, gave an impressive speech. Despite Bob’s scoffing, I took myself off to the Communist Club, resolved to hear what they had to say at least. Communism in this period at Oxford was certainly not the in thing and their meetings were tiny. An extremely dull talk on philosophy nearly finished me off, but I decided to give it one more try and went to hear a speaker on the persecution of the Kurds, struggling for national independence in the Middle East. It was there that I met a first-year student from Pakistan wearing a white woollen hat. ‘Where did you get that hat?’ I asked curiously. ‘This is a Pakistani workers’ hat,’ he replied with pride, and invited me round to tea. I quickly lapsed from the Communist Club but had made a new friend in Tariq Ali.
I had become aggressively intransigent in my rec
ently forged political views. During our second year my former débutante friend Hermione Harris suffered the full brunt of my abrasive Northernness mixed with Marxism because she happened to have a gas ring in her room. Never out of the St Hilda’s hostel in time for breakfast, I would drop in for a coffee. On this ad hoc basis we grew to like each other against the odds of our dissimilar backgrounds and despite my obnoxious behaviour. I upset a horsy member of the Clarks Shoes family by denouncing hunting, waving Capital and delivering a lecture on the labour theory of value when she tried to explain that Clarks’ policy was not to exploit their workers. I denounced Hermione when she went off to lunch with Alec Douglas-Home’s son for collaborating with an enemy of the working class and in a long rambling row insisted that under socialism cars would be abolished because they were irrational. Hermione, a woman of grace and granite, was later to be radicalized by going to South Africa after we left Oxford.
I was talking to Hermione one evening at a party given by Christopher Hill in Balliol when a young man butted in. Deciding he had assumed that women talking together was of no importance, I started to berate him. Overheard by a chuckling Christopher Hill, he and Richard Cobb instantly nicknamed me Tiger Tim, after a comic-book marmalade cat. The name caught on with Dorothy and Edward Thompson and I was Tiger from then.
My exaggerated fierceness was my way of resisting being mopped up by the crafty Oxford upper-class way of putting you down by being polite. But I soon realized it was a trap; as you blustered away, you became a quaint caricature. The truth was, though, that, thanks to Bob and socialism, in my second year I was much happier in Oxford. I had found a way of being in and against Oxford. I had made friends, I was excited by my work and I felt I could make some sense of the world.
Promise of a Dream Page 10